Gently the Day Drifts Off
by mutemelodyx
Summary: Neal's mother wasn't always all there. That's okay, though. He can manage. / A character study on Neal Caffrey from pre-series to post- by exploring his relationship with his mother. Full of headcanons, but still canon compliant.


Danny is six when he first realizes that his mother isn't all there.

He's sitting at their small kitchen table, neatly coloring in a page on the coloring book Ellen got him for his sixth birthday a few days ago. The feeling of crayon on paper is nice, and he likes how each page looks when it's completely colored in. He's not one of those kids who scribble over the whole thing and ruins the entire page, though he does sometimes experiment by putting colors out of their proper place.

His mom is humming as she prepares dinner. It's a familiar tune, one his mom has hummed since childhood. He doesn't know the words to it, or even if there _are_ words, but she told him it's a song Grandpa sang to her, and it's nice, so he is content.

That is until he hears glass shatter.

He freezes for half a second before his crayon is out of his hand and his head is whipping toward where his mother is standing.

She's staring out the window, her hands out as if she is still holding the glass dish. She's _not_ though, it's in pieces at her feet.

She doesn't seem to notice, and Danny is getting scared.

"Mom?" He says carefully, fear in his voice.

She doesn't look at him. She doesn't move. She doesn't even _blink._

"Mom!"

Still nothing.

He jumps off his chair and grabs her arm, calling out for her. She blinks slowly but doesn't turn to look at him. She's too transfixed with something out the window, which doesn't make _sense._ Danny's too short to see out of it that well, but he knows that there's nothing there but the brick and mortar of the apartment building directly next door. He knows there's _nothing._

He's young, and he's scared. He grabs his crayons and coloring book and runs to the other room. He jumps onto his bed. He doesn't cry, even though he wants to. He does spend a few minutes fighting back the tears though. His dad wouldn't cry, his mind reminds him. His dad was a _hero,_ and heroes don't cry.

His takes a shaky breath, before opening his coloring book and continues to carefully fill in the white spaces in between the lines. But it's quiet, _too quiet._ He can't hear his mom move in the other room.

He starts to hum. He picks up right where his mother left off.

Ellen finds him a while later. There are tears in his eyes, but he's _not crying,_ he insists as presses the crayon harder. He's a big boy, and he doesn't cry.

Ellen simply sits down next to him and wraps an arm around him.

He thinks of his mother's scarily blank stare. Her unresponsiveness. The way her arm stayed limp even as he grabbed on it and tugged on it.

He cries. He gets tears on his artwork.

From then on, he knows his mother isn't always completely there.

He's too young to understand the _why_ or the _how_ , but that doesn't mean he can't see the _what._

* * *

His mother stops getting up in the mornings in time to get him to school, and Ellen can only drive him two out of five days.

Danny _loves_ school. There are so many kids, so much noise, so much _color._ It's a far cry from the lonely apartment with dull, peeling walls and a woman who only seems to know who he is half the time.

He walks, but he's still late. His teacher - a nice woman with brown eyes and blue eyes just a shade darker than his and his mom's - seems upset at first, but one day he talks to her during snack break, and from then on she seems to be upset still, but not at him. He counts that as a win.

He's still late, though. The street from his home and the school are long, lonely, and dangerous, and are costing him nearly an hour of time that could be spent with smiling faces.

He simply resolves himself to go to _extra_ measures to get to school.

Breaking in (he prefers to think of it as 'entering without explicit permission') was easier than expected, but changing the clocks was harder.

He still manages it.

It doesn't work.

He's discouraged for another day, but then his mom has another episode after dinner and she doesn't come out of it in time to tuck him in, and he schemes instead of listening to a bedtime story that night.

Rerouting the bus works much better, but after a while it doesn't work anymore. It's disheartening, especially since he had made friends with the boy with dark skin and warm brown eyes who stutters and is in the grade below him.

He tries again.

Turns out, third time's a charm.

Not that the fake bus pass works right away, but eventually he manages to get a decent enough one that it works as long as no one looks at it too carefully or in too-good lighting. It's hard and long, but he finds it fun.

Ellen watches hi, but doesn't comment. When it works, she ruffles his hair and tells him not to break too many laws. He simply replies that he would _never_ break a law, because he was going to be a hero cop like his dad, and cops don't break the law!

She gives him a smile and reads him his bedtime story that night.

He doesn't notice the guilt flash through her eyes at his exclamation. Maybe if he had, things would be different.

But Danny is still young, and although exceptionally clever and rather artistically talented, he misses it in favor of being a kid and listening to a story about pirates.

* * *

He walks back home from school one day after he misses the bus talking to Abigail and Harvey. It doesn't matter too much - it's not too cold out, and he's walked these streets enough that he has the route between his home and the school by heart.

He stops in front of a noisy place full of people. The place had been closed ever since Danny could remember, with a sign in letters too small and some too complicated for him to read just yet.

Now though, it's open. There are people inside - a lot of people. They're all talking and yelling and laughing and he can hear a sharp sound that betrays some sort of game being played. It's so _loud,_ so full of life.

He looks back at the sidewalk in front of him and thinks of the blank look his mother gave him when he said goodbye to her this morning.

His feet lead him inside the pool hall, and he starts arriving home with a lot less time before dinner.

His mother never comments on it. He wonders if she notices.

* * *

Ellen is the one that goes to parent-teacher conferences. She teaches him how to ride a bike, how to throw a punch, and how to shoot a gun. She shows him how to shave, how to drive, and even takes him to an art museum on his birthday one year.

His mom is around enough one day that she teaches him the words to the song she's been humming since his childhood. It's French, she tells him in a soft voice that he rarely hears anymore. Her father's parents came to the United States as French immigrants and the song was passed down.

 _Doucement s'en va le jour,_ she says in fluent French. _Gently the Day Drifts Off,_ his mind translates.

She drifts off for a few days after that, but he fills in the time with shooting practice. He has to fulfill his father's legacy, after all.

(Maybe then, he thinks, his mother might come back completely.)

(He doubts it, but deep down, a traitorous part of him waters that seed of hope and doesn't let it die.)

* * *

Danny's eighteen when he learns his name isn't Danny, but Neal. He discovers his father wasn't a hero, but a criminal, and that his mother lied to him all those years ago.

He runs for the first time, and a part of him wonders how long it will take for his mother to notice he's gone.

* * *

Once he starts running, he doesn't stop. He travels throughout America, getting in with all the wrong crowds, learning from them, and slipping away like a shadow whenever things go wrong.

One time he finds himself a two hundred dollars richer. A _two hundred._ That's a lot for him at this point.

He forges a few documents and manages to pull enough strings to get half of it in the bank account of a woman who's still stuck in WitSec. A woman with the same coloring as him, but isn't close to as aware. Or maybe she is aware, just aware of a dream rather than reality.

He doesn't go back to St. Louis, but he checks in with Ellen with how his mother is doing.

He leaves before he can get an answer, too afraid of what it might be.

* * *

He eventually, sometime between those two hundred dollars and meeting Kate Moreau for the first time, gets over that fear. He establishes a firm link with Ellen once more. He's forgiven her at this point, but he's not going home. The life of crime is too addicting, the thrill of the con too much.

It's about as far away he can get from being a latchkey kid in Missouri with a mother who is only physically there, and he can't find it in himself to return.

He gives Ellen a bank number and starts putting a percentage of whatever he earns _(steals)_ in there for his mother. He does this without a personal comment, and Ellen respects him and doesn't try and ask him to return.

He doesn't ask if his mother notices his disappearance or wants him to come home.

Ellen doesn't tell him.

* * *

He gets caught and gets put in jail. Ellen can't visit him here, and he wouldn't want her to. He doesn't want her getting all caught up in the life of lies and cons and crime he threw himself in.

One night in prison he dreams of a woman who looks like his mother but has a laugh too lively and a spark in her eyes.

Kate leaves him the next day, and he breaks out soon after.

(He's not letting anyone else slip away, not when he can help it.)

* * *

"A sentimentalist," Peter muses as they make their way out on the balcony to give the newly reunited Jeffries and Mozzie some privacy.

"Yeah," he agrees, his eyes on the city. The loud, bright city that reminds him sometimes of a pool hall in St. Louis that let in a kid who hadn't even made it to double digits yet and even taught him the art of the hustle.

"I can't believe Mozzie kept tabs on Jeffries all these years," Peter remarks, and something about it strike a chord in Neal.

"Sometimes it's hard to say goodbye." He says, not making eye contact with the man.

Part of him was, of course, thinking of millions of dollars in art sitting just out of his reach, but still within sight.

But mostly, his mind was on a woman with long dark hair and ice blue eyes that seemed to be stuck in a different reality than his.

* * *

Ellen is killed, but his father returns.

His father is no hero. Danny didn't know this, but Neal does.

Still, he can't help but worship their connection. That that's his father, his _family_ that is speaking to him, listening to him. James Bennett does not just look at him, but he _sees._

But his father is not a good man.

His father leaves his life once more. Not because of death, but because of _justice._

Neal is left to pick up the pieces in the aftermath and ends up having to take orders from both sides of the law.

* * *

His mother dies while he's working with the Pink Panthers.

He can't attend her funeral, being on such a high-level case.

It doesn't matter anyway. Marie Bennett-Caffrey hadn't been alive in a long time. She died when Neal was only a young child. The woman who lived with him as a kid was just her ghost.

His mother dies on a Tuesday.

Neal is killed on a Saturday.

Unlike his mother, however, he does not leave this world. He does not go to the place where her mind drifted in his childhood. He does not become aware. He does not _die._

 _Neal Caffrey_ may die, the last of the Caffrey line, but _he_ does not.

* * *

There's a man sitting in the Louvre, looking at the artworks, but not seeing them. His mind is not in this time.

He thinks of another life instead, and finds himself humming.

And - _gently_ \- the day drifts off.


End file.
